earticle

영어

The commercial marketing of a series of GM (genetically modified) crops has increased continuously every year due to the transformation technology. According to the annual global review of commercialized GM crops conducted by ISAAA, the estimated global area occupied by transgenic or GM crops in 2008 was 125 million hectares, almost 5.7 times the land area of the Korean peninsula, which is about 65 fold during the ten-year period from 1996 to 2008. ISAAA found that 13.3 million farmers in a record 25 countries planted 125 million hectares of biotech crops last year, the sixth largest growth spurt in 13 years of reporting. The global market value of biotech crops was $6 billion in 2008 and will be about $15 billion in 2015. Presently, soybean, corn, cotton and canola are 4 major GM crops and 8 more plants such as carnation, sugar beet, tomato, popular, petunia, papaya, sweet pepper, squash and alfalfa are cultivating as minor. The biotech traits are herbicide tolerant gene, Bt gene, stacking of both herbicide tolerance and Bt,
virus resistance and delayed ripening. Here in Korea, researchers in universities and national institutes have poured money and labor during the last 15 years or so to develop valuable GM crops. However, none of the Korean GM crops has ever been commercially available and even not a single crop has been approved by the safety risk assessment yet. Therefore, it will take several years until any GM crop is on the Korean market. There are several major reasons why the development of GM crop is far behind worldwide levels. Those would be the lack of recognition about GMO’s power, the lack of an entire process from GM development to marketing, the lack of the private sector involvement and the huge negative concern from public. Very recently, there are signs of progress that the private sectors have also been actively working in this business with vegetables in Korea. In order to catch up in the race for the new agricultural biotechnology industry, each one of us in private sectors alongside academia and national research institutes needs to focus altogether on what can be done best in terms of developing a promising GM crop, that represents a Korean product. For this purpose, here, I address a road map for GM crop commercialization. It includes: selection of an ideal target gene for crop transformation, development of GM crop, transgenic breeding, biosafety assay and the time table from the beginning of GMO development to commercialization. Especially the subject called transgenic breeding that is not well known in most of the plant science arena will be mainly discussed.